A paired offering of Irish whiskey (left) and Scotch at The Whiskey Room in Burlington, last Friday. / GLENN RUSSELL/FREE PRESS

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Free Press Staff Writer

Cheryl Feinberg is a bartender at Reuben James on Main Street. In about five months on the job, she’s developed methods to tell if a person has had enough to drink. Or possibly too much.

“I look for the ability to speak clearly,” Feinberg said. If a customer is unable to order his drink, that’s a clue.

“Somebody tried to say Pinnacle, and got as far as the P,” Feinberg said. (Pinnacle is a kind of vodka.)

She has seen customers yell at people they’re with, and behave inappropriately with staff and customers.

Feinberg remembers a woman who left the Main Street bar and discovered her wallet was missing. She returned to look for it and accused other customers of taking it. Then started to paw through people’s belongings searching for her wallet, Feinberg said.

“We escorted her out,” she said.

During this season of revelry, it’s not a bad thing to toast moderation.

Here’s Bill Goggins, director of enforcement for the Department of Liquor Control, with a sobering reminder:

“Obviously, it’s illegal for anybody to over-serve a customer,” Goggins said. “The state’s law holds that person responsible. If you get over-served, you leave a bar, you go fall down a flight of stairs due to intoxication when you get to your house, you could sue that bar.

“There is a large onus of responsibility that is placed on the server. They are responsible for getting you intoxicated and your actions after that.”

At Queen City Tavern, bartender Buck Frisch is 23, not many years a legal drinker himself. He asks for proof of age from any customer who does not look “substantially older than myself,” Frisch said.

He lists several “dead-giveaways” that indicate a customer should be cut off:

• Stumbling, including people who stumble as they enter the bar

• Mumbling

• Unable to keep their eyes open sitting at the bar

• Approaching customers and starting conversations (that often become arguments).

“I hate to judge every as person as they walk through the door,” Frisch said. “But you kind of have to.”

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To people who stumble through the door or sit at the bar and start to nod off, Frisch will say: “It looks like you’ve already had a few before you got here.” And he’ll offer them water.

“I don’t want to put anyone at risk,” Frisch said.

He’s been trained to void transactions and return a customer’s money in exchange for their drink if he senses they’ve had too much to drink, Frisch said.

“They’d rather lose $3 than have a drunk person bothering customers,” he said.

Bartenders should look for behavior that a reasonable person would consider signs of intoxication, Goggins said.

“That’s the threshold we teach,” he said. “You have to cut that person off and try to get that person to someone who can look after them.”

Although people respond differently to alcohol, another clue for bartenders is the amount a person has had to drink, Goggins said.

“Seasoned drinkers can drink a case of beer a day and you wouldn’t know it,” he said. “Somebody else can have two glasses of wine and fall out of their chair.”

As part of its undercover work, the department looks for over-service violations, Goggins said. These efforts uncover an offense 99.9 percent of the time, he said.

It’s a “very small percentage” of bars that undercover investigations, Goggins said. “Most work very hard to ensure” customers drink an appropriate amount, he said.

“Being a bartender is an extremely difficult job,” Goggins said. “It’s not a job that I’d want to do. A person’s inhibitions are down as soon as they have their first drink. Somebody could walk into your bar and walk and talk fine. Next thing you know their head is on the bar.

“You’re there with an intoxicated individual and it’s your job to say, ‘I can’t serve you anymore.’”